Quick Take
More than half of HVAC contractors now sell a second trade, and the money behind that shift is not subtle. Private equity has bought close to 800 HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies since 2022, and more than 60 percent of the top 50 HVAC firms are institutionally backed. Blackstone paid roughly 18.5 times EBITDA for Champions Group in February 2026, against 4 to 7 times for a standalone HVAC business. Nobody pays that multiple for trucks. The premium buys the second and third trade attached to the same customer list.
That strategy runs on software most HVAC platforms were never built to provide. A single-trade tool can schedule work, invoice it and store a customer record. What it usually cannot do is tell you whether the plumbing division made money last quarter, hold a separate price book for electrical work, or stop a dispatcher from sending an unlicensed technician to a panel upgrade. That second list is what this article is about.
Here is where the seven platforms we track land for a shop running two or three trades:
ServiceTitan for the shop that wants a real division-level P&L. It is the only platform in the group that organizes jobs by trade and by division natively and reports on both. It costs $245 to $500 per tech per month, plus an implementation fee reported between $5,000 and $50,000.
FieldEdge for an HVAC and plumbing shop that quotes from a book. Its price book spans all three trades at 25,000 or more tasks, and it reports around $100 a month for the office plus about $125 per technician.
Housecall Pro for a two-trade shop under 15 techs that wants division reporting without an enterprise contract. MAX runs $299 a month and includes profit-by-business-unit reporting.
Service Fusion for the multi-trade shop where headcount is the cost problem. $649 a month for unlimited users means the 30th electrician costs nothing extra, and you give up reporting depth to get that.
Jobber, Workiz and Commusoft each have a shop they fit, and for three trades that shop is narrower than their marketing suggests.
At a Glance
| Platform | Capterra | Entry price | Multi-trade reporting | Price book | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceTitan | 4.3/5 (339) | ~$245-500/tech/mo, quote-gated | Business units by trade and division | Pricebook Pro, 5,000+ tasks, $398+/mo | 15+ techs, two or three trades, wants division P&L |
| FieldEdge | 4.2/5 (312) | ~$100 office + ~$125/tech/mo | Job-level cost, trade as custom field | FieldEdge Flat Rate, 25,000+ tasks | HVAC and plumbing, book-driven quoting |
| Housecall Pro | 4.7/5 (2,741) | $59 / $149 / $299 | Profit by business unit report | Profit Rhino plugin, ~$149/mo | Two trades, under 15 techs |
| Service Fusion | 4.3/5 (308) | $259 / $399 / $649, unlimited users | None | None | Headcount-heavy, cost-controlled |
| Jobber | 4.6/5 (1,458) | $39 / $119 / $199 / $599 | None | None | One trade, or a light second trade |
| Workiz | 4.4/5 (218) | Quote-gated, est. ~$229/mo | None | None | Phone-heavy dispatch |
| Commusoft | 4.7/5 (211) | Quote-gated, per license | Contract and site level | None | Commercial PPM across sites |
The cost column is where a multi-trade owner should linger. At 20 technicians, ServiceTitan runs somewhere between $80,000 and $108,000 a year at the reported per-tech range, before implementation. FieldEdge lands near $41,000 in year one including setup. Service Fusion charges $7,788 for unlimited users at any headcount. Housecall Pro’s MAX tier is $3,588 flat. That is a spread of more than 20 times between the top and bottom of the table for the same 20 people, and the difference you are buying is reporting granularity and a price book.
What Multi-Trade Actually Breaks
Five things change when the second trade arrives. Four of them are the same dimensions that define HVAC software generally, viewed through a different lens.
One Company, Three Cost Structures
A journeyman electrician and an HVAC service technician do not cost the same per hour, and they do not generate the same revenue per call. A shop that prices all three trades off one labor rate has already lost the argument, because the report it produces cannot show the loss.
The mechanic underneath is job costing, and it fails in a specific way in multi-trade shops. Labor has to be captured per technician at that technician’s true burden rate, materials have to land on the right job and the right trade, and both have to be visible while the job is still open. Platforms that store a single hourly rate and multiply it by hours produce a number that averages three businesses into one and describes none of them.
ServiceTitan handles this through business units with two attributes that matter: trades (HVAC, electrical, plumbing) and divisions (service, install, maintenance, sales). A business unit can only map to one division, which forces the shop to decide what a job actually is before it books it. Reports filter by either attribute, and the QuickBooks integration maps revenue by business unit, so a shop can hand its accountant a plumbing service figure and an HVAC install figure that came from the same ledger.
Housecall Pro takes a lighter path to the same destination. It supports business units, and it publishes a profit-by-business-unit report inside job costing, plus estimate conversion and jobs reports filtered the same way. For two trades under 15 techs, that covers the question.
The Price Book Has to Split Before the Techs Do
Flat-rate pricing is the strongest margin lever in HVAC, and in a multi-trade shop it has to be three books wearing one coat. Plumbing tasks are not the hard part. Labor rate, material markup and overhead recovery all differ by trade, and a book built for one trade applies the wrong constants to the other two.
| Price Book | Task library | Cost | Trade coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| FieldEdge Flat Rate (formerly Coolfront) | ~25,000 repairs | ~$129/tech/mo, historically also priced per work order | HVAC, plumbing, electrical, appliance |
| ServiceTitan Pricebook Pro | 5,000+ | $398+/mo on top of the subscription | Built out per trade by the shop |
| Profit Rhino / Callahan Roach | ~8,500 | $179+/user, or ~$149/mo as a Housecall Pro plugin | HVAC emphasis, extends to plumbing |
| Service Fusion, Jobber, Workiz, Commusoft | None | Included in nothing, because there is nothing | None |
FieldEdge is the only platform in the group whose book was built across trades rather than adapted to them. That matters more than the task count. A shop running HVAC and plumbing on one platform, with one book that already contains both, skips the six-month project of authoring the second half.
The subtler failure is staleness. A book that carries an R-410A line and no R-454B line loses money on every A2L recharge, and the refrigerant transition is still moving. Our refrigerant compliance breakdown covers what that costs per pound.
Licenses Are Dispatch Constraints, Not HR Files
This is the dimension that separates a multi-trade platform from a single-trade one, and almost nobody markets it.
An HVAC technician needs Section 608 certification to legally handle refrigerant. That is federal, it expires, and the card has to stay on file at the place of business. An electrician works under a state license with its own renewal cycle, and most states run separate journeyman and master tiers with different scopes of work. Plumbing adds another license plus, in many jurisdictions, a permit per job. A dispatcher assigning work has to know all of it at the moment of assignment.
What the platforms actually do is uneven:
- ServiceTitan tracks EPA 608 certification with expiry reminders, and refrigerant work is the one credential it treats as a first-class field. State trade licenses go in as custom technician fields.
- FieldEdge tracks technician certification, so expiry is visible, and serial-level equipment records sit under it.
- Housecall Pro has no certification module. It expects custom fields, and the dispatch board will not stop an assignment either way.
- Jobber, Service Fusion, Workiz and Commusoft ship nothing for it.
None of the seven blocks a dispatch on a lapsed license. That gap costs money in a way that is easy to underestimate, because the exposure is not the salary of the person who took the call. It is the permit that was never pulled, the inspection that fails, and in the refrigerant case a civil penalty ceiling of $124,426 per day per violation.
Cross-Sell Is the Whole Point, and the Record Has to Follow
The financial case for the second trade is cross-selling, and the numbers are documented. Between 15 and 25 percent of an HVAC customer base has a plumbing need within 12 months, rising to 30 to 40 percent once cross-selling becomes a process rather than an accident. That is a marketing claim until the software can support it.
Support means three things. The customer record has to be shared across trades, so a CSR taking an HVAC call can see the water heater installed two years ago. The equipment history has to be per unit rather than per trade, because a water heater and a condenser are both serial-numbered assets with warranty clocks. And the estimate has to be able to carry a second trade’s line items, because the most valuable version of this is one visit that handles both.
A platform that stores equipment history at the address level, with no serial-number library, can run a single-trade residential shop and cannot run the cross-sell play. Housecall Pro sits at the address level, which is the main structural limit on its multi-trade story. FieldEdge and ServiceTitan both keep records at the serial level. The general FSM comparison covers what that gap looks like over a few years of installs.
Three Peaks, One Board
Peak season is the last dimension, and multi-trade shops usually think it helps when it mostly complicates dispatch. Residential HVAC call volume in summer runs about 3.5 times spring volume. Plumbing has its own winter event when lines freeze, and electrical demand tracks neither, which means the shop’s revenue is smoother than a single-trade competitor’s and its dispatch board is harder.
Smoothing the board requires routing that respects trade. Sending the nearest technician is the wrong answer if the nearest technician cannot legally do the work or does not carry the parts. That puts the license field and the truck inventory back in the dispatch decision, and it means a routing engine that ignores trade assignment will produce routes that look efficient and require a second truck.
The 5 to 20 tech picks cover how the platforms hold up under HVAC peak load on their own.
Feature Comparison
| Capability | ServiceTitan | FieldEdge | Housecall Pro | Service Fusion | Jobber | Workiz | Commusoft |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trade and division tagging | Native, two attributes | Custom field | Business units | None | None | None | Contract level |
| Profit by trade report | Yes | Built from job data | Yes, business unit report | No | No | No | By contract |
| Flat-rate price book | Pricebook Pro, $398+/mo | 25,000+ tasks, cross-trade | Profit Rhino plugin | None | None | None | None |
| Labor rate per trade | Yes | Per job, configurable | Limited | Single rate | Single rate | Single rate | Per contract |
| Equipment serial records | Serial level | Serial level | Address level | Basic | Client level | Basic | Multi-site assets |
| EPA 608 cert tracking | Native, expiry reminders | Certification tracked | Custom fields | None | None | None | None |
| State license as dispatch block | No, custom field | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Refrigerant usage log | Native module | None | Custom fields | None | None | None | None |
| Membership / PM agreements | Strong | Strong | Strongest under 15 techs | Weak at volume | Simplified | Basic | PPM and SLA |
| Inventory per truck | Yes | Yes | Basic | Yes | Basic | Basic | Yes |
| Public pricing | No | No | $59 / $149 / $299 | $259 / $399 / $649 | $39 / $119 / $199 / $599 | No | No |
| Unlimited-user tier | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
Two rows in that table are empty across the board, and both should be read as an industry gap rather than a vendor ranking. No platform in this group blocks a dispatch on a lapsed state license, and only one ships a refrigerant log. A multi-trade shop buying on the strength of a feature grid will find that the grid is thinner than the sales deck.
The Reporting Question, Priced
Division reporting is the feature that decides this purchase for most multi-trade shops, and it is worth putting a number on rather than a feeling.
Take a shop running 20 technicians, 12 in HVAC and 8 in plumbing, doing roughly $6 million a year. Suppose the plumbing division runs a 41 percent gross margin and HVAC runs 48 percent, which is a normal spread. The owner’s question is whether plumbing is worth the trucks, and the honest answer requires knowing that plumbing carries a higher callback rate and a lower average ticket. Without trade-tagged reporting, that analysis is a quarterly project built from exports, and in practice it does not happen.
Put the analysis cost on the other side of the ledger. A bookkeeper spends a full day a quarter reconciling exported job data into a trade split, at a loaded rate near $45 an hour, which is $1,440 a year. Add the decisions made without the number, and the case for a platform with native division reporting gets stronger than the subscription gap suggests in the small-shop range.
Then the gap itself. At 20 technicians, ServiceTitan is roughly $80,000 to $108,000 a year against Service Fusion’s $7,788. The difference buys reporting granularity, a native refrigerant module, serial-level asset records, and a price book. It does not buy a scheduling improvement, because Service Fusion schedules fine. A shop that already knows its plumbing margin and prices both trades off a working book is paying for features it will not use. A shop that cannot answer the margin question is paying for the only feature it actually needs. The ServiceTitan pricing breakdown covers where that range comes from and the full review covers what users say about living with it.
What to Watch For
Business unit setup is a project, not a toggle. ServiceTitan’s own documentation is specific that a business unit maps to one division, and that jobs booked against an unmapped unit drop out of the technician scorecard. A shop that enables business units without deciding what a job is will produce reports with holes in them and conclude the software is wrong.
Per-user pricing multiplies against the second trade. FieldEdge at $125 per technician charges the same for an electrician as for an HVAC tech, and the second trade adds headcount before it adds revenue. At 20 technicians that is roughly $30,000 a year in per-seat cost alone. Service Fusion’s flat fee is the structural answer to this, and its reporting is the price you pay for it.
The contract terms are not the same across the table. ServiceTitan’s 12-month minimum is described by reviewers as longer in practice, and its Better Business Bureau record includes an early-termination charge of $39,375. Housecall Pro bills month to month. That difference matters more in a multi-trade shop, because adding a trade is exactly when you discover the platform you bought cannot report on it.
Inventory per truck gets harder, not easier. Three trades means three parts profiles, three reorder points and three sets of truck stock to reconcile. Only a few platforms in the group do inventory with any seriousness, and the ones that do not will push the parts count into a spreadsheet that goes stale in a month. Our hidden costs guide covers the add-on pricing that tends to arrive alongside inventory modules.
Scope note. This comparison covers the seven platforms we track for HVAC. Commercial MEP contractors with project-based work, cost codes and progress billings are a different market, served by BuildOps and Simpro among others, and those products are outside our testing scope. If your second trade is commercial electrical on new construction rather than residential service, the platforms here are the wrong shortlist.
How I Evaluated
This assessment draws on five sources.
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Vendor documentation for multi-trade data models. ServiceTitan’s business unit documentation, including the trade and division attributes, the rule that a business unit maps to a single division, and the effect of unmapped units on technician scorecards. Housecall Pro’s help center entries on business unit reporting, including the profit-by-business-unit report under job costing and business-unit filters on jobs and estimates. FieldEdge’s product pages for FieldEdge Flat Rate, the renamed Coolfront price book, including its stated coverage of HVAC, plumbing, electrical and appliance repair.
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Verified Capterra and Software Advice reviews. ServiceTitan 4.3/5 (339 reviews), FieldEdge 4.2/5 (312), Housecall Pro 4.7/5 (2,741), Jobber 4.6/5 (1,458), Service Fusion 4.3/5 (308), Workiz 4.4/5 (218), Commusoft 4.7/5 (211). FieldEdge Flat Rate Mobile carries 4.3/5 across 102 reviews on Software Advice, with users praising the repair database fit and complaining about automatic archiving of older work orders and QuickBooks synchronization on historical data.
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Pricing data. Public tiers from Housecall Pro, Service Fusion and Jobber. ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Workiz and Commusoft are demo-gated, so their pricing is estimated from user reports and third-party analyses and is marked as an estimate throughout.
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Market and consolidation data. Private equity acquisition counts across HVAC, plumbing and electrical since 2022, institutional ownership among the top 50 HVAC firms, and the multiple spread between multi-trade platforms and standalone HVAC businesses. Cross-sell rates from contractor advisory work on multi-trade expansion.
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Hands-on trials. Jobber, Housecall Pro and Service Fusion offer self-serve access and were used directly. ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Workiz and Commusoft are demo-gated, so the assessment of those platforms rests on documentation, user reviews and published product material rather than direct use.
One limitation belongs up front. No platform in this group produced a verified user review describing trade-level profit reporting in daily use, so the division reporting assessment rests on documented features and data models. That is weaker evidence than a shop describing its own month-end close, and it should be read that way. Quotes in this article are from verified reviews on Capterra and Software Advice. No vendor paid for placement, and no vendor reviewed this article before publication.
FAQ
Q: Can one software platform run HVAC, plumbing and electrical under a single account?
Yes, and four of the seven we track do it with some grace. ServiceTitan is the only one built for it at the reporting layer, because it separates business units by trade and by division and builds a technician scorecard for each division. Housecall Pro supports business units and publishes a profit-by-business-unit report under job costing, though its depth runs out well before ServiceTitan’s. FieldEdge serves all three trades and carries a price book that covers them, which makes it the practical pick for an HVAC and plumbing shop quoting from a book. Service Fusion handles multiple trades on a flat monthly fee with unlimited users, so software cost does not rise as electricians are added, and its reporting is the weakest part of the product. Jobber and Workiz will schedule three trades without complaint and will not tell you which one is profitable.
Q: How do I see profit by trade inside HVAC software?
Three things have to be separated first, and the platform either does it or it does not. Revenue needs a trade tag, meaning every job, estimate and invoice carries a business unit or division. Cost needs the same tag, meaning payroll burden is captured per technician at what that trade actually costs rather than at one company-wide labor rate. Overhead then has to be allocable, because a shop running two trades out of one building shares rent, insurance and a CSR staff the software never sees. ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro both attach jobs to business units and report on them. FieldEdge tracks revenue and cost by job, and the trade split becomes a custom field on the record, which works as long as someone maintains it. On Jobber, Service Fusion, Workiz and Commusoft, per-trade profit is a spreadsheet exercise built from exported job data, and the export is where most shops stop.
Q: Does flat-rate pricing work across multiple trades?
It works, but not off a single book. FieldEdge Flat Rate, the product formerly called Coolfront, carries a repair database of roughly 25,000 tasks spanning HVAC, plumbing, electrical and appliance repair, which makes it the most direct answer for a shop quoting all three. ServiceTitan sells Pricebook Pro at $398 or more a month on top of the subscription with 5,000 or more tasks, and the plumbing and electrical sections get assembled by the shop. Housecall Pro rents Profit Rhino at about $149 a month with roughly 8,500 tasks. Service Fusion, Jobber, Workiz and Commusoft ship no price book at all. The trap in a multi-trade shop is subtler than the presence or absence of a book. It is the labor rate. A single hourly rate applied across HVAC, plumbing and electrical tickets prices the trade with the highest burden rate below cost, and the division that looks healthiest in the report is the one losing money.
Q: When should a multi-trade shop leave a general-purpose platform?
The trigger is usually a second trade carrying its own license or its own price book, not headcount. A shop doing HVAC and drain cleaning on Jobber at 8 techs is fine. The same shop adding gas fitting and electrical permits is not, because three things arrive at once: a license that has to be checked before dispatch, a price book that has to price different work, and a question from the bank about which division is carrying the other. Our mid-size comparison puts the per-user cost crossover at three to five techs, but the reporting need usually forces the move first. The exception runs the other way, and it is Service Fusion: a 30-person multi-trade shop on its $649 unlimited-user tier pays less than a 12-person shop on per-tech pricing, and accepts weaker reporting to do it.